To inspire greater confidence in its investigation, the House select committee on the Capitol riot should do far more publicly to investigate the security breakdown at the Capitol and Congress’s own responsibility for it.
Soon after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, allies of former President Donald Trump began suggesting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself had rejected the request, made days earlier by Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, for a National Guard deployment on the day of Congress’s electoral vote count. They continue, wrongly, to do so. As multiple fact checks agree, this narrative is false. The House speaker has neither a direct nor a significant, indirect role in managing Capitol security.
Still, the fact remains that Sund did ask in advance for a Guard presence and was turned down. And although Democratic Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser secured a small contingent of Guard troops for the day, she had said they were needed mainly for traffic control, had asked for them not to be well-armed, and, quoting the New York Times, “had sent a letter to top federal law enforcement officials [on Jan. 5] warning against excessive deployments.”
NATIONAL ARCHIVES SCRAMBLES TO COUNTER TRUMP’S PAPER HOARDING AND RIPPING HABITS
Meanwhile, powerhouse conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch is suing the Capitol Police for videos and emails relating to security for Jan. 6, but the request has been blocked. The police argue that the videos are not “public records” and that Congress enjoys “sovereign immunity” from such suits. The legal standards governing these matters are complicated, and there are at least semi-good reasons for both claims.
Still, why should the Capitol Police resist? On a matter of such public importance, anything other than full transparency just looks bad.
The committee itself has been remarkably silent on this, despite being as public as possible about its requests for information from, subpoenas of, interviews with, and legal contempt actions taken against rioters and Trump staff and allies. It should not be so.
Of the five “teams” on the Jan. 6 special committee, one is reportedly looking into questions about Capitol security, at least nominally. Yet the public has no idea how extensive that part of the probe is right now or what aspects of security it will cover. It is one thing to say the results of this self-examination will be made public when the committee finally issues its report, but why not at least give some indication to the public of what the areas of interest are? The committee has shown no such reticence about its pursuit of answers from Trumpworld, so why the silence here?
It almost gives the impression of a cover-up.
I write as a strong supporter of the committee’s mission and as one who insists the Capitol incursion was an event of extraordinary long-term danger to constitutional processes and to public faith therein. Nonetheless, with the ex-president, almost the entire House Republican Conference, and the Republican National Committee all attacking the investigators and belittling the severity of that day’s events, the committee ought to make extra efforts not to be seen as a partisan witch hunt. Its public, myopic focus on only the perfidy of Trumpworld, and not on any internal errors of omission or judgment, plays into the image of hyperpartisanship.
For reasons both of image and of substance, the committee should move to make available as much information as possible. That should include waivers of immunity where the needs of public safety aren’t compromised. An investigation this important should spare no political interest and know no partisan boundaries.
